Letter to the editor: It's not right

The juvenile justice system in Carbon and Emery counties is out of control. These people have torn apart family after family in our county's justifying what the do by telling everyone that it is in the best interest of the children.

The court officers go into the homes of these families and take their children. They are strangers to the children, people these children do not know. They then place the children to live with more strangers. Then they expect the children to accept their situation and cooperative with the strangers they have been placed with. When children then "act out" or hide in the closet, when they don't sleep at night, when problems in school arise, when they have speech problems, when they exhibit bad behavior, turning to drugs or alchohol, then the court blames the parents. Instead of seeing it for what it is; kids ripped from the people that know and love them.

There are cases where children are abused and neglected. There are cases where drugs and alcohol are involved. Most fo these cases do need intervention and the children need to be helped. But in Carbon and Emery counties, the Division of Family Services and the juvenile justice system have gone far beyond what is necessary.

Taking children from their homes beause they have bad grades, have missed school, got into a fight, because a child is small for its age because of medical reasons, have parents who are financially unstable or that don't have a car are not reasons to take children from a home.

Many cases are exagerated by case workers and are not properly looked into. It seems to me that there are better ways to held these families than ripping them apart, then going after the parents who are financially unstable for money and then having someone else care for the children.

The shock and devastation children go through when DCFS takes them from their parents is more detrimental to them than almost anything else the courts can do. Even if the children are returned to the parents the trauma of the experience is carried throughout their lives.

In many cases the problems that these children encounter at the foster parents homes is worse than what happened (or didn't happen) in their own homes. Once a child is take from the parents, nothing is ever the same, no matter what the age of the child.